As we've seen, an important part of Photos is iCloud Library. And I do see the value in having your library available online, especially for those that want to travel light with a MacBook or Air, an iPad and an iPhone.

I'd need the 500 GB plan now (and uploading would take weeks), and would have to upgrade to 1TB in a year or so. 99% of those photos I'd never want to show anyone or manipulate on my iPhone or iPad. And I'd need to have it all backed up anyway, unless I trust that Apple will never, ever change its mind about iCloud storage. However, it might be convenient to be able to get to a photo that I neglected to deliberately load onto my iPhone or iPad.

Note that these costs are in addition to any real hosting plan, where you might have web sites, photo galleries, etc. Apple's prices are three times what I pay for three years of unlimited GB, full-service hosting with unlimited e-mail, galleries, web sites, etc.

"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
Steve Jobs

A friendlier Aperture
The desktop Photos app likely won’t offer all the power that currently exists in Aperture; I’m certain its photo-alteration tools will take a hit. But I hope the app’s library management tools will not. Managing a large volume of images is something Aperture excels at, and it will be much needed in the cloud storage age. Apple has announced that the upcoming app will support plug-ins, so I suspect many developers will get cracking on that. I hope that the Photos app will also support external photo editors like Pixelmator—or, even better, take advantage of Yosemite’s extensibility options to let you run external editors right from within Photos.

Stephen Hart wrote:Richard,
No to burden you, but can you give a point-by-point comparison between Photos Sharing in Aperture and Photos? The language looks more or less the same:

With iCloud Photo Sharing, you can share photos and videos with just the people you choose, and you can let them add their own photos, videos, and comments. Friends and family can subscribe to your shared albums to view them on all of their devices, leave comments, and get notified automatically when you add new photos and videos.

Below is a screen shot from Aperture's HELP section. One of the major problems with sharing on the iCloud using Aperture is the necessity for anyone wishing to view the photo album to have an iCloud account. Not everyone does and I'm not going to ask people to create an account just to view the photos I want to share.

Another issue seems to be Aperture's use of iCloud Streaming. If I understand it correctly (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong) iCloud Streaming leaves your photos on your iCloud for 30 days and then they're gone. This won't work for me.

I want to use my iCloud like I use my Flickr account. Once I create an album on Flickr I can send the URL to friends to view the photos. These folks do not need a Flickr account and the photos stay in my Flickr account until I delete the photos or the account itself. You can do this using Photos either on an iDevice or on a Mac but you can't using either iPhoto or Aperture.

I'd just use Flickr except I hate the ads. And the $49/year ad free Flickr account is misleading. If you log in to your account you don't see any ads but anyone else viewing the photos sees the ads. For that matter if you just want to view your Flickr photos without logging in first you also have to deal with an ad every third or fourth photo. I understand there ain't no free lunch but Flickr's ad free account really isn't. Using my iCloud account means my friends and I don't have to deal with ads.

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Always burn your bridges. You never know who's coming up from behind.

Richard Serkes wrote:Below is a screen shot from Aperture's HELP section. One of the major problems with sharing on the iCloud using Aperture is the necessity for anyone wishing to view the photo album to have an iCloud account. Not everyone does and I'm not going to ask people to create an account just to view the photos I want to share.

Sounds like the most important point. Too bad it's so hard to dig up.
I agree that what I want is to post some photos (and videos), set who is "invited" (even if it's not really secret) and get to decide who gets to do any more than see it. In fact, this is a "killer app" that would make me want to transition to Photos.

So the next step for me is to see if there's a reasonable workflow to add an album to Photos and then publish it, while I'm still using Aperture as my main app. (Your method is looking more reasonable by the minute. )

"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
Steve Jobs

You got it. Using a shared library, import your photos to Photos then edit them in Aperture. Any changes made to the photos in Aperture will appear Photos if you're using a shared library. Finally, use Photos to create and publish your albums on your iCloud account. You'll be given a URL for that album and you can email it to others using any email program or by using the INVITE feature within Photos itself.

In the field that let's you do the above there are all kinds of limitations you can set as to who can view the album (password protected), who can leave comments, who can add their photos, etc. It's a real nice way to share your photos. I just wish it were part of Aperture.

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Always burn your bridges. You never know who's coming up from behind.

Stephen Hart wrote:But wait. If I open Aperture, I don't have the choice of having it use the Photos library. So how do you set up a library shared between Photos and Aperture?

Damn, you're right! I just added a photo to my Photos library and it didn't show up in Aperture. In Aperture you can select the iPhoto library or the Aperture library. I used the iPhoto library but the new photo in Photos wasn't in Aperture. What's strange is, in Aperture when I selected the iPhoto library it listed the last time the iPhoto library was modified and that time/date was exactly when I dropped a new "test" photo into Photos.

Go to Finder/Pictures and you find libraries for iPhoto, Photos, and Aperture. But in Aperture the Photos library isn't listed. So I guess dropping new photos into Photos not only adds them to the Photos library, but also the iPhoto library. But it doesn't add it to the Aperture library. To quote Michael Palin, "My brain hurts." But I guess I was wrong. Adding photos to Photos doesn't make them available in Aperture. I'll have to rethink my strategy

On another note, I drag-and-dropped a .JPG from my desktop to the Photos icon in the Dock and worked just like it used to. Photos opened up and imported the .JPG. Somewhere in this extensive thread is a comment about you can't do that anymore. Yes, you can.

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Always burn your bridges. You never know who's coming up from behind.

OK, why hadn't I noticed this before? After OS 10.10.3 loaded Photos it didn't delete iPhoto. It's still there in the Applications folder. And if you tell iPhoto to open the old iPhoto library to the Aperture library all your photos are there. So if Photos is supposed to supplant iPhoto why did Apple leave iPhoto? As Ricky Ricardo might say, "Apple, you've got some splannin' to do."

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Always burn your bridges. You never know who's coming up from behind.

Richard Serkes wrote:On another note, I drag-and-dropped a .JPG from my desktop to the Photos icon in the Dock and worked just like it used to. Photos opened up and imported the .JPG. Somewhere in this extensive thread is a comment about you can't do that anymore. Yes, you can.

Here's Jay's comment:

I used to be able to drag and drop photos from iPhoto onto the Photoshop icon in my dock. Doesn't appear to work with the new Photos app.

So, he wants to drag and drop from an app to a Dock icon, not from the desktop to a Dock icon.

"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
Steve Jobs